Religion and maktoob were comforts -- the notion of divine authorship (and its obvious extension, ultimate justice) elastic enough to accommodate even inflexible facts like the Holocaust and that my mom was both good and burdened with a vascular disease.
She added that it was important to make an effort to remain active as soon into the onset of the disease as possible, as one of its symptoms is that the patient can become very fixed and inflexible in their ideas.